Monthly Archives: November 2018

I recently noticed that words related to the passing on of knowledge tend to be built on a base consisting of the consonant combination r-d. The thought occurred to me when I came across the archaic English word rede, which means “counsel” or “advice”. I immediately made the connection to the German word reden, which means “to talk”. Reden is used much like its English counterpart, to refer to a substantive communication, often where advice or counsel is given. Think of the implication in a sentence like “We’ll talk when I get home.”

The other place that rede survives in modern English is in the poorly understood name of the 9th century Anglo-Saxon monarch of Wessex, Æthelred the Unready. His nickname does not mean “ill prepared” but rather “unadvised” or “lacking counsel” and is a play on words given that his actual name means “noble counsel.”

Following my usual process, I started thinking about other words built on the r-d model (and adjacent sounds like t and th) that related to communicating knowledge and made an amusing discovery related to the formulation “reading, writing and arithmetic.” At first glance this is simply an alliterative phrase tying together three skills one learns in school that, apparently randomly, share similar sounds.

But the similarities between these words are not the result of randomness; the connection between the consonant combination r-d and the idea of knowledge and this goes back to Proto-Indo European (PIE). The PIE root of both reading and writing is *red, meaning “to scratch or cut,” which brings to mind ancient forms of writing such as carving symbols into wood and bone, as with runic inscriptions. Arithmetic is a bit more complicated, as it comes to English from Greek, but the r-d (or in this case, r-th) base is clearly there, though some sources, such as the American Heritage Dictionary, trace it back to the PIE root *re(i).

At this point I found myself in a familiar place. I had uncovered an interesting and revealing PIE root and made connections to a complex of words that carried a concept forward from the darkness of the past.

But something bothered me. There is another cluster of words built around r-d, those coming from the PIE root *reidh from which we get ride, raid, road, ready, etc. This other cluster, and indeed the letter r itself, clearly relates to the concept of motion.

At first, I felt that these two different connotations, knowledge and motion, were discordant until the phrase “to read fluently” popped into my head and it all came together. The concept of “fluency” is one of motion and the knowledge-related words coming from the r-d root relate to the passing on of that knowledge. In other words, knowledge moves. From a different angle, a common way to refer to an intelligent person is to say they are “quick” or “quick witted.” Clearly, the concepts of knowledge and motion are intimately entwined.

This then, led me to Alan Watts’ explanation of the Dao as “a sort of rhythmic intelligence” (What is Tao?, page 37) which posits movement as being an intrinsic part of knowledge. Put differently, knowledge exists in order to be communicated, to be passed on and to flow back and forth between people, cultures and eras.

I’ve been wondering about the word future for a while. In other Germanic languages it tends to be made up of two parts, the first meaning something like “to” or “forward” and the second meaning “to come” in the Continental languages or “time” in Scandinavia. Here are some examples:

zukunft (German)

toekomst (Dutch)

toekoms (Afrikaans

framtida (Swedish)

fremtid (Danish)

framtid (Norwegian)

framtíð (Icelandic)

Initially, I assumed that this was simply a case of English using a French loan word where its Germanic cousins had retained the native word. This view was perhaps strengthened by my knowledge of the word futuro in Spanish.

I let the matter rest there for a few weeks until one day I recalled that there is another way to say future in Spanish, porvenir, which follows the Germanic model and can be read literally as “for to come”. After a bit of research I discovered that the same situation exists in French, which has both futur and avenir.

This rekindled my interest in future and I began digging into its etymology. I was surprised to find that it wasn’t as straightforward as I had expected. It came into English through French, which got it from Latin. It seems to have begun as an irregular form of the word esse, which means “to be” and can be seen in words such as essence and its derivatives.

Before the adoption of future, English had a native word for the concept, toweard, which follows the Germanic model and has some interesting connections. The second element of the word, –weard, comes from the Proto-Indo European (PIE) root *wert, which means “to turn.” Both the word and meaning survive in a functional way in modern English as the suffix –ward in words such as forward and backward. So, in Old English the future was something that one turned into.

However, -weard has a far more interesting set of connections that radiate out from its PIE root. In English, this is best exemplified by the word wyrd, which is generally translated as “fate” and is cognate with the Old Norse word urdr. This allows a poetic reading of toweard as something like “turning into fate” which I find appealing.

The other connection that jumps out at me is the German word werden, which means “to become” and is used as an auxiliary verb to form the future tense. For example, in German, “We are eating” is “Wir essen” while “We will eat” is “Wir werden essen.”

As regular readers will know, I love to keep digging and make these kinds of connections that allow me to consider the different angles and shades of meaning of a word. However, this “archeological” approach sometimes leads me to miss the forest for the trees.

In this case, it was only at the end of my investigations that I realized the word toweard had, in fact, never left English at all. It survives, very recognizably, as toward, shorn of its larger meaning and reduced to the status of a preposition.

Nightmare is a half understood word in the sense that the first half is clear, but the second half is not. What is a mare in this context and what does it have to do with waking up in the middle of the night with your heart pounding? As it turns out, both halves of the word are interesting and both have remarkably deep and consistent Indo-European roots.

Night is derived from the Proto-Indo European (PIE) word *nekwt, meaning “night”. This word is remarkably stable across languages and follows a patter of n + vowel + palatal or velar consonant, generally fricative:

nacht (German)

nox (Latin)

naktam (Sanskrit)

natt (Swedish)

naktis (Lithuanian)

It is also seems to me to be connected to two other words, next and near. As is often the case, this connection is a bit clearer in German where the words are nächste and nahe, respectively. Other German words that fit this pattern are nach, which means “to” or “towards” and nachbar, which means “neighbor” in the literal sense of a “near dweller”.

The common thread linking all of these words that follow the form n + vowel + palatal or velar consonant seems to be the idea of proximity or closeness, which fits nicely with the constrictive nature of night and darkness in general.

Now for the second part of the word, mare. This comes from the Old English word mare, meaning an evil spirit or an incubus. This word also has deep and consistent Indo-European roots, with the word being mahr in German and mara, marra or mare in the Scandinavian languages. While there are a couple of competing theories regarding which PIE root mare comes from, the leading contender is *mer, which means “to harm” or “to rub” with the connotation of “chafing”, “rubbing away” or “wearing out”.

Putting the word back together we get to something that seems to indicate an evil spirit in close proximity to the sufferer and putting them under duress with constant, wearying pressure. Not a bad way to describe something that haunts your sleep and terrifies you while you are unconscious.

In the end, I’m left with thought that the original idea as to the cause of nightmares, a literal demon perched atop you while you sleep, pressing on you, wearing you down in the darkness, is nothing more than a poetic way to describe a phenomenon that would today be described in more prosaic terms using scientific psychological language related to things like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that I don’t think most people understand any better than they understand the term “demon”.

It seems to me that people in both eras attempted to define and describe something complex and poorly understood with terms that were appropriate to their times and cultures. Ultimately, though, they are both using metaphors and, as usual, the older ones seem more vibrant and compelling.

About the Author

S.R. Hardy is the author of Don’t Care None, as well as various short stories, poems and translations. His work has appeared in venues such as Mythic Circle, Eunoia Review, Eternal Haunted Summer, Beorh Quarterly and anthologies such as The Shining Cities and Beyond the Pillars. He is currently at work on a variety of books, stories, poems, and translations.